Interview: Sven Bergvall on Perception, Insights and Analysis at Ericsson

Over the past 140 years, Ericsson has been at the forefront of communications technology.

Over 40% of the world’s mobile traffic is carried over Ericsson’s networks. They have customers in over 180 countries and industry solutions ranging from Cloud services, Mobile Broadband, Network Design and Optimization.

Ericsson has one of the industry’s strongest patent portfolios with a total count of over 39,000. Research & Development (R&D) is at the heart of its business and approximately 23,700 employees are dedicated to it R&D activities alone.

We recently spoke to Sven Bergvall, Brand Performance Manager at Ericsson, who has been a Brandwatch customer for over two years.

We spoke to Sven about how Ericsson deploys social insights, the benefits – as well as the challenges – of having access to a plethora of social data.

Hi Sven. Can you tell us about your role at Ericsson and how your role fits into the wider organization?

I’m globally responsible for perception, insights and analysis from an outside in perspective. What that means is that I am responsible for gathering insights from customers and prospects on what their perception of Ericsson and the market situation is, as well as the perception of our digital presence.

My role sits within the Marketing Communications Team at Ericsson. I’m not responsible for content itself, I provide insights into key issues and key trends, and then I pass those insights onto more content related teams within marketing and communications.

Who uses Brandwatch within the business?

Multiple teams make use of Brandwatch Analytics, and the usage is very varied across each department.

Our Media Relations and PR teams use Brandwatch, both here in Sweden, but also on a global level, finding and monitoring their respective, regional country level content.

Brandwatch is a key tool for us, but I’ve found it’s always an educational journey when it comes to using a tool like Brandwatch. Not only for finding how to use the platform, but also understanding what you’re actually getting, what type of information you are looking for.

Once the various teams understand the capabilities of the platform I can help by providing insights that are relevant to their work.

How does Brandwatch help you in your current role?

As an organisation we use Brandwatch in three distinct ways. The first one is in terms or target follow-up – we use it as a way to understand how we have performed in relation to competitive benchmarks.

We have a number of brand Queries set-up within Brandwatch to help us understand how our visibility is within the different key markets and key publications, as well as within a number of key topics.

Then we have the more event based monitoring, or campaign-based tracking that we do within Brandwatch. We’re able to set specific time parameters within the platform to monitor specific activities. We can then find influencers and review how we performed against other events. We can also ascertain how we performed against key KPIs or goals determined ahead of a campaign.

Thirdly I would say, (and this to me is the direction that we of course should move in much more strongly) is the proactive work that Brandwatch enables us to do. Brandwatch helps us identify emerging trends and topics, picking up the key influencers that we really want to reach with our messaging with content.

We’re often talking as a company about three very important areas going forward;

• 5G
• Internet of things
• The Cloud

We’ve been working hard to understand how those topics are developing, to make sure that our messaging is in line with what the core subjects and themes are around those topics.

Using Brandwatch, it has been a really interesting journey for us in terms of understanding who is actually driving the conversation with these topics and adapting the way that we interact with those key stakeholders.